The Lede

For this special Christmas episode of “The Lede,” New Lines magazine’s Ola Salem, Maysa Mustafa, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Surbhi Gupta gather ’round the mic with host and producer Joshua Martin to talk about the worldwide rise of Christmas and whether it’s outgrowing its Christian roots — before finishing off with our traditional holiday quiz. 

Nearly 10 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it seems crystal clear that there is no turning back to placing Russia on the global stage in either business or politics in the way it once was. Bill Browder, author of two books about Russia (including his latest, “Freezing Order”) and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was once one of the largest foreign investors in Russia and has seen the country go through pivotal changes before. But during his time in Russia, massive corruption was revealed in some of the companies that Hermitage had invested in. Browder knew he couldn’t continue to turn a blind eye to what the oligarchs and corrupt officials were doing. “So I started to do what are known as naming and shaming campaigns, where we would research how these people went about doing the stealing, and then share the research with the international media,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. By 2005, Browder had been expelled from Russia after having his offices raided and being declared a threat to national security.  One young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky investigated the raids, reporting on the subsequent $230 million fraud involving Russian tax officials. In retaliation, Magnitsky was arrested, tortured for 358 days and beaten to death in Russian police custody. This tragedy marked a pivotal moment in Browder’s life and a turning point in his career. “I've made it my life's work to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. I can use these skills to try to help all of these new victims as best as I can.” One result is the Magnitsky Act, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of human rights violators. It became law in the U.S. in 2012, and 35 other countries have since adopted its standards.  Browder continues working tirelessly to expose the web of corruption among Russian leadership. “There's two ways you can fight the Russians: You can fight them with tanks, which I have no expertise in, and you can fight them in the banks. And I'm one of the people who knows more about this than just about anybody.” It’s easy to see why today Browder is one of the Kremlin's biggest enemies and a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side.    According to Browder, there’s still plenty of corruption left to uncover, not least of which stems  from Putin himself. He calls the war in Ukraine “a war of distraction,” aimed at redirecting the potential backlash over this to a foreign enemy. “There’s nothing new about this. Dictators have done this, you know, through eons.” And the West ought to bear responsibility for enabling Putin, if not encouraging him. Now the sanctions are too little, too late. “This is probably the biggest misconception that most Western policymakers and politicians have: that there is some kind of end game, that there's a negotiated settlement,” Browder says. “That if Putin gets X and Y, he'll be happy. And then we can all go and live in peace. But I don't believe there's any chance whatsoever of a negotiated settlement.”  Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-kholy

“We want better. Reform our institutions.”  Those were the words on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s placard when she was arrested in July 2020 for a peaceful protest against Zimbabwe’s government. Recently she was convicted on a charge of inciting public violence for that act. And yet, the award-winning novelist, playwright, poet and filmmaker— named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women of 2022 by the Financial Times — hesitates to label herself as an activist. “I do not call myself an activist, but I call myself somebody who believes in citizen engagement as a responsible citizen of the country,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “I think that is an idea that they simply do not want to prevail in Zimbabwe. They cannot afford to have increasing numbers of Zimbabweans thinking of themselves as responsible citizens who need to be engaged.” Dangarembga is referring to what she calls Zimbabwe’s current military dictatorship, which came to power after November 2017, when Robert Mugabe was removed and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa as president and party leader of ZANU-PF. While Dangarembga is resolute in her view of those events, she recognizes that not all Zimbabweans share her interpretation. To her, this signals the skill with which the military manipulated the narrative, getting people out into the streets to celebrate the coup. “Zimbabweans will debate anything from here to heaven,” she contends. “They were able to pretend it was not a coup. But what happened was a coup.” While she recognizes that the economic situation in Zimbabwe is dire—and much worse now than during Mugabe’s time—she argues that this is not due to mismanagement, as some might suggest. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to force Zimbabweans to rely on the ZANU-PF for basic survival resources. So why haven’t the Zimbabweans revolted? It has nothing to do with weakness, says Dangaremba. “Zimbabweans are afraid that if they go against the government, the military will retaliate. I think that Zimbabweans have been so oppressed that they are no longer able to access the necessary agency. Yet they are the ultimate power.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

Otto Skorzeny was the Waffen SS commando behind some of Nazi Germany’s most significant special operations. When Mussolini’s government fell, it was Skorzeny’s team who were parachuted into Italy to rescue the dictator. At the end of the war he was detained by Allied forces and awaited a denazification trial. But Skorzeny’s story didn’t end there. He escaped prison and fled to Franco’s Spain before continuing his career in the shadowy world of Cold War intelligence. He became a military adviser to the Spanish, Egyptian and Argentinian governments, and spent time as a bodyguard for Argentina’s first lady, Eva Peron. Over the course of his post-war career, he worked for the CIA, West German intelligence and even Israel’s Mossad.  “As a CIA official wrote after the war, old intelligence hands are always attracted back to the job they know best,” says Danny Orbach, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War.” This is why, he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai, Skorzeny and those like him ended up as mercenaries, informants and spies.  And there were many like him. “The vast majority of Nazi criminals either got off with meager  punishments, or just escaped completely unharmed,” Orbach says. As the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain quickly shifted their priorities from hunting down Nazi war criminals to recruiting them, in hopes of getting some sort of advantage over their new adversaries. “People are very, very quick about forgetting past hatreds when a new enemy comes on the agenda,” Orbach remarks.  This, he explains, was why so many agencies were willing to work with such men — some of whom, like Alois Brunner or Klaus Barbie, were personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings during the Holocaust. The calculus was as simple as it was cynical: “What's more important: the past or the future?” “The condemnation usually comes after there is no longer a practical need in employing them,” he adds. Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El-Kholy

In an age defined by disinformation, it has become almost a cliche to talk about “post-truth politics.” But while truth has been the media's foremost concern in the era of "fake news," there has been surprisingly little reflection on what it actually means in the first place. We're exhorted to defend it from authoritarian leaders and conspiracy theorists alike, yet we seldom consider what precisely it is that we’re defending. But Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, certainly has.    “Truth is definitely a slippery idea,” she tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “The way truth works, especially in democratic settings, is that we don't authorize any one person, or one institution, or even one method, say, as the way to know something. That is wonderful in certain ways. But of course, it also makes knowing anything very messy.”   But while the truth may never have been as certain as many like to imagine, today’s degree of polarization nevertheless poses a new and dire challenge.“To have a good debate, we have to first agree that there's a problem,” says Rosenfeld. “If we can't even agree on something like the unemployment rate, democracy starts to fall apart.”   “The law doesn't help us much here,” she adds. “The technology doesn't help us much here. We're catching up with a phenomenon that we didn't know we were unleashing when we did."   Produced by Joshua Martin

If the urge to travel is a universal human instinct, the urge to tell others of your journey may well be too. In medieval North Africa, travelers and tourists produced a plethora of travelogues and guidebooks for a readership eager to read about their voyages. “There's a variety of reasons why people wanted to read this kind of writing,” Amira K. Bennison, a historian at the University of Cambridge, tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson. For merchants, it was important to know which cities produced which goods and what they could expect on their own journeys. For rulers, it was a source of information or even intelligence about what was happening in their realms. But for many people, it was simply because they wanted to read stories of far-off lands. “It takes them out of what for some readers must have been a much more humdrum existence, with little chance of travel beyond their own town or country.” Not all of these were accurate. “There are tales of a statue in Cadiz which speaks, or cities of bronze in the desert,” explains Bennison. “I don't think that people in the past were necessarily naive or necessarily taken in by these kinds of stories, but the world was much more mysterious. There were lots of places where most people had never been and would never go, and really weren't quite sure whether these things existed or not.” But just like today, travel writing could be as much about the author’s experiences as the place itself. Medieval readers didn’t just want to know what was there; they wanted to know what it felt like to be there too. “I think it's that which really captures people's imagination and gives them the sense of the expansiveness of the world,” Bennison says. Produced by Joshua Martin

As the first nationwide elections since the January 6 Capitol attacks, America’s 2022 midterms were something of a test for the country’s troubled democracy. Americans went to the polls in the shadow of a year of turbulence and rising political violence. With the votes still being counted, journalist Robert Evans joined New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson to try to make sense of the results. “The last time we had a midterm election that went this well for the party in the White House was 2002, in the immediate wake of 9/11,” he explains. Few expected such a successful showing for the Democrats. Between the nation’s economic woes and Joe Biden’s struggling approval ratings, conventional wisdom predicted a “red wave.” But predictions of Republican revanchism turned out to be greatly exaggerated. High youth turnout meant that progressive candidates like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman performed much better than had been predicted, while the increasingly extreme rhetoric of many Republican candidates proved alienating. “The thing that we couldn't have known was the degree to which voters were going to react against the power grabs that the right has made,” says Evans. “And I'm happy to say that it does look like that's one of the stories from last night.” But what that rejection means for the increasingly violent climate of American politics remains to be seen. A recent YouGov poll found that nearly 40% of Americans believe the country is heading for civil war. “I'm still very worried about how hot the temperature has gotten, and how deeply angry American politics still is,” Evans remarks. “The fact that maybe they're not going to continue to win elections doesn't mean that they're not going to keep getting angrier.” “Americans do have a pretty long, proud tradition of murdering each other over politics,” he adds. “The worst thing you can do is assume this terrible thing could never happen here because we're somehow special.”

“This BMW gets hit by a truck in the Aegean region,” explains former U.S. diplomat Josef Burton. “And driving it are a Kurdish clan leader, a police general and a far-right mafia drug baron. And the trunk is just full of Deutschmarks and silenced submachine guns.” The incident caused a major scandal in Turkey, and subsequent parliamentary investigations revealed the existence of a rogue network of intelligence officials, army officers, mafiosos and ultranationalists. Implicated in hundreds of killings over several decades, it was this network that the term “deep state” was coined to describe. “This wasn’t just state repression,” Burton tells New Lines Magazine's Joshua Martin. “The idea of the deep state is that there's elements within the state which are just doing what they want, without any going back to the chain of command. They're just doing it.” For Americans, though, the term has taken on very different connotations. “The meaning shifted between this very specific historical phenomenon to any structure of power you don’t like,” Burton says. It became heavily associated with former President Donald Trump, who uses it to denigrate his political opponents and encourages his supporters to do the same — particularly in the months since August’s FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. “It really raises the temperature,” says Burton. “The more unhinged and irrational these sorts of terms become, I think the more we have to point to concrete historical examples of this defined thing,” he adds. Produced by Joshua Martin

Since the turn of the century, the global tide of democracy has begun to recede. Men like Putin in Russia, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and of course Trump in the United States have all sought to subvert their countries’ institutions and consolidate their own authoritarian rule. “These men have similar personalities,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “They're ruthless. They have no moral code. They are opportunistic. They will be whatever the public needs them to be at that moment.” Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian fascism at New York University, watched their rise with a combination of horror and recognition. In her book, “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” she compares the men behind the current wave of autocratization to their counterparts from the 1930s and the Cold War. “The way they get to power changes over 100 years. But the net effect of what they do is much the same.” She believes there are two main things that define a “strongman”. The first is personalist rule. “These are people who come to power and organize the state around their personal obsessions and needs,” she explains. The second is their appeal to masculinity — “all strong men use machismo as a way of legitimizing themselves.” This, she says, is the reason Putin is so often photographed shirtless and why Trump brags about his sexual prowess. This emphasis on masculinity is why most strongmen tend to be just that — men. But the recent election of far-right populist Giorgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy complicates that picture. “She is actually a strongwoman,” Ben-Ghiat says. “The first one we've had.” Produced by Joshua Martin

The U.K. has had months of political chaos, with Liz Truss not even the first British prime minister to resign this year. In June, MPs began to realize that the only way to rid themselves of the scandal-prone Boris Johnson was to force him out of office. Johnson refused as long as he could manage. For satirist and architect Karl Sharro, recalling the many long revolts against British colonialism over the 20th century, the irony was too delicious to ignore: “It's great that the British are discovering how difficult it is to get rid of British rule,” he tweeted. Sharro’s absurdist humor is aimed at many targets – corrupt politicians and soccer referees among them – but perhaps at the media above all. His observations have resonated widely with those frustrated by patronizing international news coverage, even earning him a book deal — “And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News.’” “It’s just a way of poking fun at certain Western narratives and attitudes,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. It’s something that occasionally gets him into trouble with those who don’t see the funny side. He argues that ”secular taboos” are emerging, stifling creativity and leaving humorists like him with little room for error. “And these sorts of things — you go talk to anyone from a Middle Eastern or Arab background, and these are things you struggle against all your life,” he says. “You struggle against societal norms and restrictions, family norms and restrictions, authoritarian norms and restrictions. You want to be consistent with yourself, you want to say these transgressions should be dealt with through a freer form of critique.” He’s uncomfortable with the idea that any topic should be decisively off-limits: “You can joke about anything; it depends how you do it.” He reserves particular ire for those Westerners who were happy to laugh at his tweets about the Middle East but who failed to see the joke when it landed closer to home. Sharro has greeted the “general sense of dysfunction creeping in the West” with both anger and unabashed schadenfreude, despite living in the U.K. himself. “The collapse of the country has been very rewarding for me personally, in whatever comedic capacity I have,” he remarks.